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Next Live Event TODAY 2pm – Quality assurance for automated texts? - Webgears presents its quality assurance process including tools + methods – REGISTER NOW ➙
An Overview
Relevance
Product Filter Pages or Product Listing Pages (PLP) function like separate sections of supermarket shelves:
Shoppers know that dairy products are grouped together, and that's where they'll find the cottage cheese they're looking for. Laundry detergent is on a different shelf.
Assortment Guidance
PLPs provide a structured and clear presentation of a wide range of products in a web store and allow customers to refine their search based on various criteria. This allows shoppers to browse and discover products within a specific category or subcategory without having specific information about their desired product.
SEO Benefit: Increased Visibility
The importance of Product Listing Pages goes beyond the user experience. It's also important for search engine optimization.
A well-optimized PLP can help improve the visibility of your products in search engine results, thereby increasing traffic to your site.
What is a product listing page?
Product Listing Pages (PLPs) are an indispensable part of modern e-commerce platforms. But what exactly does this term stand for?
A PLP is a web page that basically displays a section of a web store's product range. How the product section is created is not significant
Related: Filter Pages
The term filter page is sometimes used when users create their own assortment using filters.
See also: Category Pages
Category pages are a widely used term in e-commerce that refers to a group of products put together by the shop provider, such as women's pants.
Another view of category pages is that they are broadly structured parent pages with PLPs as subcategories.
Very often there are also mixed types, where the predefined categories are narrowed down by filters (facets).
Conclusion:
Since there is no clear distinction between the terms and since the functions are basically similar, we will stick to the term Product Listing Page.
Important SEO Opportunity with PLPs
Category pages are the SEO's favorite because they provide space for content and SEO opportunities normally limited to the home page and product detail pages – without the need for complex advice pages.
PLPs offer the opportunity to use relevant keywords and phrases related to the products listed. By integrating these keywords into the page content, page title, meta description, and other relevant areas, PLPs can be better optimized for related search queries.
It is PLPs that enable effective internal linking within a website as they can be used to create a networked (hierarchical) structure.
Some pages are more successful in terms of SEO and therefore have more authority for search engines. If you link from pages with high authority to newer or less visible pages, you share some of this established credibility. In this way, you are signaling to search engines that these linked pages are also important, which can improve their rankings.
PLPs facilitate indexing for search bots by providing structure and hierarchies to the website (and thus also improve the ranking).
Well-designed PLPs increase the chances that the user will stay in the store and click through to subcategory pages or product detail pages. Length of stay is an important quality signal for Google rankings.
User Experience
Content Elements of a PLP
At first glance, content and copy don't seem to play a very big role on a PLP.
Longer copies are usually found as SEO texts on larger category pages below the screen fold.
The textual content of a PLP is made up of smaller units, but these can fulfill important functions for the entire webshop.
Content Elements of a PLP
Content Elements of a PLP
The names of the category or product range selection should enable a clear assignment to the products listed there.
Here it is beneficial to focus on familiar product groups, such as wedding dresses or children's bicycles. At the same time, the category names are also very important SEO elements and should contain the main keywords.
The same applies to the naming of subcategories and existing filter options.
Content Elements of a PLP
The communication goal of this copy describing the category (or product range section) is not so focused on the direct sale of products, but rather on providing answers to the customer's orientation questions at this point. Possible guiding questions could be
The copy doesn't need to be too long, both from a user and SEO perspective. Up to now, this description text has mainly been created for the orientation of search engines and usually displayed below the product images with the important keywords. However, it can also be placed directly next to the filters as an introduction.
Content Elements of a PLP
Content Elements of a PLP
The listed products are usually best identified by the product image.
In order not to disrupt the overview, only the most necessary information is provided: As a rule, this is the product name, price and, if applicable, availability.
It can be useful to add short labels to make the selection easier, such as “Bestseller” or “Best rated”.
Comparison
Many of the same principles that govern the design, content, and optimization of a Product Detail Page are equally true for a PLP.
However, they differ significantly in some criteria and features.
In terms of frequency, PDPs clearly have the upper hand: On e-commerce sites, there are significantly more PDPs than PLPs, with 5 PLPs and 95 PDPs per 100 pages. Things get more interesting when it comes to traffic. In an analysis of 30 retailers from 8 European countries, the SEO agency Verbolia found that PLPs bring in much more traffic from search engines than PDPs. In almost all sectors, the categories and filter pages are much stronger traffic generators than the PDPs.
Search intent is an important factor in the design of both PLPs and PDPs. It can be derived from the phrasing of the search query: the more specific the search and the more precise the name of the product being searched for, the better off users are on a PDP.
For this reason, PDPs belong to the lower funnel in the sales process, where the focus is directly on completing the purchase, while PLPs belong more to the upper funnel, where the focus is on selection.
As a rule of thumb, if the search query matches exactly 1 product, the PDP comes into play. For more vague search queries, categories and filter pages are more suitable.
The most significant difference between PLP and PDP is the desired user behavior on the site.
With the PDP, users should stay and decide to make a purchase if possible.
The main function of PLP is to redirect users to the right page, either to another category page, a guide or directly to the product detail page.